No, they weren't journal entries (allowing automatic submission of journal entries as stories is an idiotic idea, frankly.) Of the 3 things I submitted, on was a legitimate story which I thought was interesting and had a tech angle that was frankly better than the stuff we're getting now. The other 2 were complaints about the site, and apparently submitting them is the only way to get any attention, as the "editors" seem to be completely uncommunicative and unresponsive to most direct queries.
I can bitch about bad stories because I've been around long enough to recognize bad ones. I don't post submissions because that's not my primary interest. I was iffy on the PS2 forgeries, and since it wasn't accepted, I took that as a lesson learned.
Lose the gimmicks. Slashdot was great because it focused on hard tech news, and tended to post things that the Slashdot community were interested in. Now, it seems to be at the whims of a few submitters (MrSeb, Hugh Pickens) with the editors asleep at the switch and posting stuff that's not even remotely tech news, typically biased political propaganda.
Stop creating your own vanity projects. You need to stop fantasizing that you're a news *source* and get back to being a tech news *aggregator*. We don't want you to create custom content, and especially not tripe like device destruction porn, reviews, reports from conventions (is there any bigger waste of video than a "from the convention floor" type report?) You're such a late entry to this space that it'll take years to get even remotely good at it, if ever. Find the great content out there, and post stories and links. That's it!
It's just absurd to think that these recent missteps were simple errors in judgement. The claim that the infamous hoodie video was intended (per Soulskill) as "a quick, silly, completely non-serious video" is suspect. Why would something *intended* as a silly video even be on the front page and not in Idle? How out of touch do you need to be to think that the readers wouldn't be offended and instantly assume an ad masquerading as a story?
And in spite of the massive negative feedback (which must have been massive indeed to rouse the editors from their slumber to actually acknowledge the problem), you *still* ran that atrocious Plantronics tripe, and pretended to be surprised that people hated it.
Honestly, the recent changes stink of you trying to pad your resumes.
Ugh, let me get my votes on record in opposition to each of these ideas. If you want to do this sort of thing, then the slashdot team can create a "slashdotlite.org" site and post all this sort of stuff there, but it simply doesn't have a place on slashdot proper.
You still haven't provided any clear reason as to WHY you want to do this. Why do you think this is such a great idea, when the readers seem pretty firmly against it?
OK, fair enough. I'm going to take you at your word on this. However, it points out an interesting problem where I feel that the slashdot editors have failed, and that's in presenting stories that *seem* like advertisements, due to simply posting submissions as written without using editorial discretion to moderate the tone of the submission.
What that means is you, as editors, need to take a look at the submissions from the viewpoint of your readership, and say "Does this look like an ad?" If the answer is yes, then either fix the submission, create a new article on your own that presents a more neutral view of the item in question, or just don't post it.
Regarding "let's make a video about [X]" or "Let's send timothy to a convention", WHO CARES? You want to make videos? Fine, but either create a new site, or put them on yuotube! Frankly, I'm not interested in your opinions about gadgets or tech or anything, or what conventions you go to, or any of that stuff. You guys have one job, and that's to sort the news posts and try to make sure that they reflect the historical perspective of Slashdot: News for nerds, Stuff that matters. You already have farmed out a lot of that through the firehose, it's just insulting when you ignore the downvotes and post stuff anyway because you like it personally.
In addition, you're over-featuring a few prolific posters, and posting a lot of non-tech news. The guy who wants to put "astronaut" for his application on a ballot? That's not even worthy of being "idle". The flood of articles from Hugh Pickens is just awful, as he seems to think that anything with even the remotest whiff of a tech angle is deserving of submission, and even worse, you editors just go along with it.
I'm glad you guys at least acknowledge (finally!) the UI bugs and are working to fix. Whatever happened to slashcode? Does it even reflect the current slashdot codebase?
Slashdot is supposed to by news for nerds, not news for people with classical liberalism tendencies. I have a lot of interests outside of technology, but I don't expect slashdot to be the place to go to read about them. I want tech news, not political junk that's not related to technology (other than the fact that the audio was edited, which is a trivial task now.)
This isn't news for nerds, is it? It's not even stuff that matters, really. It's just more spam from Hugh Pickens, slashdot definitely needs to stop posting all of his offtopic submissions.
I'm sick of this Hugh Pickens spammer being constantly posted on Slashdot with the lamest of lame stories. How much is he paying them for all this air time? Or is it a straight up blackmail operation? No wonder CmdrTaco left.
Hulu Plus doesn't work for me. I can't stand the idea of paying for commercials, and their policies on availability drive me nuts. We looked at Hulu Plus to get access to the previous season of Castle, but as soon as the new season premiered, they yanked it. Seems pretty incomprehensible that they'd restrict the ability to catch up on a program like that. I'd think that people just jumping in to a new season would be most inclined to get caught up on previous seasons, but they make that impossible.
The increase in cost affected my service, as it caused me to get less service. The continued changes to the web site affected my service, because it made it more and more difficult to search for and find content I was interested in (regardless of whether it was DVDs or streaming. I'm not buying DVDs or Blu-rays, because it's just not that important to me to see movies. It was certainly nice to be able to enjoy the occaisional movie at home, without having to fight crowds at the theaters, but my life doesn't revolve around TV and movies (at least not anymore) so I can easily say goodbye to NetFlix and just not replace it with another service.
If their model works for you, then by all means, keep subscribing. It doesn't work for me though, not anymore, so I'm voting with my wallet.
It's obvious that NetFlix doesn't understand its customers anymore (if it ever did.) What I used to take as excellent customer focused strategy now seems to have been completely accidental. Every customer facing change they've made over the past few years has made the NetFlix experience progressively worse. At this point, I've had enough of their confused thrashing, and will still be cancelling my subscription. I checked my records, I joined NetFlix in 2004, and used to have a 3 DVD plan, but inf recent years have dropped to 1 DVD, then no DVDs, and now, no NetFlix.
I'm cancelling my NetFlix account entirely. It's been one misstep after another, with NetFlix falling down the stairs and hitting their head on every step. Every move they've made recently seems designed to alienate me as a customer (and I've been a subscriber for many, many years.) The price changes, the web site makeover disaster, and now completely splitting the DVD and instant streaming, they've completely removed all the important features that made NetFlix so useful. It's now clear why they haven't reversed course on any of this...it's obviously been in the planning stages for a very long time and now that they've started, they can't stop. These weren't individual missteps, it was one giant leap off a building. They're forgetting that the product is video, and users don't really differentiate between DVD and streaming for consumption...I just want a service that provides ANY movie I want to watch, and I'll pick the delivery channel.
Didn't take long for the dupmasters to take over again, eh?
Nothing to see here, please move along...
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 1
CmdrTaco is only gone a few days and here's Mitnick again. Why should this particular criminal get any play on slashdot? He wasn't even a particularly good hacker.
You're the editor with a taste for stories that most closely match my own. I've learned to avoid stuff from some of the other editors that just don't seem to "get it", but your posts were always interesting and in line with my interests, very much News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. I'm guessing that my interest in slashdot will wane without you at the helm, which is sad because I know from my comment history I've been coming here since at least 1999. slashdot has been my primary destination, the first site I open every morning, and the one I check most often during the day.
Well, they may not want to remove it, but in my case they honored the EULA and got Steam to refund my money (for a differnt Ubi game). I'm just not going to install and use the Ubi launcher. I got enough of that kind of nonsense from GTA IV.
I just won't get it or play it. I recently got a refund on a Ubisoft game because of their "always on" DRM. I haven't bought StarCraft either, since I heard it has a similar requirement. I really don't care if Diablo III has a multiplayer component at all, since I'd never play it online in the first place. Developers are free to design their games as they wish, and consumers are free to vote with their wallets. I played all the previous Diablo games and expansion packs, and was really looking forward to Diablo III, but no game is so important that I'd put up with those restrictions. That's $120 that blizzard won't ever see from me.
I purchased the game via Steam. When I tried to run it, it popped up stuff about installing the Ubi launcher/client. The EULA clearly said I could get a refund if I didn't accept the terms of the agreement. I followed the instructions (requesting a refund via the Ubi support site.) They tried to send me to Steam for the refund, but I've dealt with their "customer service" enough to know that wouldn't work. So I pointed out the terms ofthe EULA, which specifically said it's Ubi's problem to handle refunds, and they contacted Steam to get the transaction reversed. I got notification from Steam today that the refund was issued, and the games are gone from my library.
I'm already getting a refund for an Ubi game that has that DRM (The Settlers 7). They tried to push me back to Steam for a refund, but I pointed them to their own EULA, where it says you can get a refund if you don't agree to the DRM and the retarded Ubi launcher, and they're handling it.
No game is so good, interesting, or important to my life that I'd be willing to submit to this always on DRM.
I dumped Facebook a few months back, because I got tired of having to constantly tweak the privacy settings, and I was drowning in Zynga spam from other users.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they weren't journal entries (allowing automatic submission of journal entries as stories is an idiotic idea, frankly.) Of the 3 things I submitted, on was a legitimate story which I thought was interesting and had a tech angle that was frankly better than the stuff we're getting now. The other 2 were complaints about the site, and apparently submitting them is the only way to get any attention, as the "editors" seem to be completely uncommunicative and unresponsive to most direct queries.
I can bitch about bad stories because I've been around long enough to recognize bad ones. I don't post submissions because that's not my primary interest. I was iffy on the PS2 forgeries, and since it wasn't accepted, I took that as a lesson learned.
Nice try with the Poisoning the well attack, though.
I want Slashdot back!
Lose the gimmicks. Slashdot was great because it focused on hard tech news, and tended to post things that the Slashdot community were interested in. Now, it seems to be at the whims of a few submitters (MrSeb, Hugh Pickens) with the editors asleep at the switch and posting stuff that's not even remotely tech news, typically biased political propaganda.
Stop creating your own vanity projects. You need to stop fantasizing that you're a news *source* and get back to being a tech news *aggregator*. We don't want you to create custom content, and especially not tripe like device destruction porn, reviews, reports from conventions (is there any bigger waste of video than a "from the convention floor" type report?) You're such a late entry to this space that it'll take years to get even remotely good at it, if ever. Find the great content out there, and post stories and links. That's it!
It's just absurd to think that these recent missteps were simple errors in judgement. The claim that the infamous hoodie video was intended (per Soulskill) as "a quick, silly, completely non-serious video" is suspect. Why would something *intended* as a silly video even be on the front page and not in Idle? How out of touch do you need to be to think that the readers wouldn't be offended and instantly assume an ad masquerading as a story?
And in spite of the massive negative feedback (which must have been massive indeed to rouse the editors from their slumber to actually acknowledge the problem), you *still* ran that atrocious Plantronics tripe, and pretended to be surprised that people hated it.
Honestly, the recent changes stink of you trying to pad your resumes.
Ugh, let me get my votes on record in opposition to each of these ideas. If you want to do this sort of thing, then the slashdot team can create a "slashdotlite.org" site and post all this sort of stuff there, but it simply doesn't have a place on slashdot proper.
You still haven't provided any clear reason as to WHY you want to do this. Why do you think this is such a great idea, when the readers seem pretty firmly against it?
Just....don't. If you want to do this, just create a slashdot video channel on youtube. That sort of junk just doesn't belong here.
OK, fair enough. I'm going to take you at your word on this. However, it points out an interesting problem where I feel that the slashdot editors have failed, and that's in presenting stories that *seem* like advertisements, due to simply posting submissions as written without using editorial discretion to moderate the tone of the submission.
What that means is you, as editors, need to take a look at the submissions from the viewpoint of your readership, and say "Does this look like an ad?" If the answer is yes, then either fix the submission, create a new article on your own that presents a more neutral view of the item in question, or just don't post it.
Regarding "let's make a video about [X]" or "Let's send timothy to a convention", WHO CARES? You want to make videos? Fine, but either create a new site, or put them on yuotube! Frankly, I'm not interested in your opinions about gadgets or tech or anything, or what conventions you go to, or any of that stuff. You guys have one job, and that's to sort the news posts and try to make sure that they reflect the historical perspective of Slashdot: News for nerds, Stuff that matters. You already have farmed out a lot of that through the firehose, it's just insulting when you ignore the downvotes and post stuff anyway because you like it personally.
In addition, you're over-featuring a few prolific posters, and posting a lot of non-tech news. The guy who wants to put "astronaut" for his application on a ballot? That's not even worthy of being "idle". The flood of articles from Hugh Pickens is just awful, as he seems to think that anything with even the remotest whiff of a tech angle is deserving of submission, and even worse, you editors just go along with it.
I'm glad you guys at least acknowledge (finally!) the UI bugs and are working to fix. Whatever happened to slashcode? Does it even reflect the current slashdot codebase?
Slashdot is supposed to by news for nerds, not news for people with classical liberalism tendencies. I have a lot of interests outside of technology, but I don't expect slashdot to be the place to go to read about them. I want tech news, not political junk that's not related to technology (other than the fact that the audio was edited, which is a trivial task now.)
This isn't news for nerds, is it? It's not even stuff that matters, really. It's just more spam from Hugh Pickens, slashdot definitely needs to stop posting all of his offtopic submissions.
Lots of companies, including the one I work for, won't let you arbitrarily buy Apple products with company money.
I'm sick of this Hugh Pickens spammer being constantly posted on Slashdot with the lamest of lame stories. How much is he paying them for all this air time? Or is it a straight up blackmail operation? No wonder CmdrTaco left.
Hulu Plus doesn't work for me. I can't stand the idea of paying for commercials, and their policies on availability drive me nuts. We looked at Hulu Plus to get access to the previous season of Castle, but as soon as the new season premiered, they yanked it. Seems pretty incomprehensible that they'd restrict the ability to catch up on a program like that. I'd think that people just jumping in to a new season would be most inclined to get caught up on previous seasons, but they make that impossible.
Hah! I doubt I've seen 16 movies in the past year!
The increase in cost affected my service, as it caused me to get less service. The continued changes to the web site affected my service, because it made it more and more difficult to search for and find content I was interested in (regardless of whether it was DVDs or streaming. I'm not buying DVDs or Blu-rays, because it's just not that important to me to see movies. It was certainly nice to be able to enjoy the occaisional movie at home, without having to fight crowds at the theaters, but my life doesn't revolve around TV and movies (at least not anymore) so I can easily say goodbye to NetFlix and just not replace it with another service.
If their model works for you, then by all means, keep subscribing. It doesn't work for me though, not anymore, so I'm voting with my wallet.
It's obvious that NetFlix doesn't understand its customers anymore (if it ever did.) What I used to take as excellent customer focused strategy now seems to have been completely accidental. Every customer facing change they've made over the past few years has made the NetFlix experience progressively worse. At this point, I've had enough of their confused thrashing, and will still be cancelling my subscription. I checked my records, I joined NetFlix in 2004, and used to have a 3 DVD plan, but inf recent years have dropped to 1 DVD, then no DVDs, and now, no NetFlix.
I'm cancelling my NetFlix account entirely. It's been one misstep after another, with NetFlix falling down the stairs and hitting their head on every step. Every move they've made recently seems designed to alienate me as a customer (and I've been a subscriber for many, many years.) The price changes, the web site makeover disaster, and now completely splitting the DVD and instant streaming, they've completely removed all the important features that made NetFlix so useful. It's now clear why they haven't reversed course on any of this...it's obviously been in the planning stages for a very long time and now that they've started, they can't stop. These weren't individual missteps, it was one giant leap off a building. They're forgetting that the product is video, and users don't really differentiate between DVD and streaming for consumption...I just want a service that provides ANY movie I want to watch, and I'll pick the delivery channel.
Didn't take long for the dupmasters to take over again, eh?
CmdrTaco is only gone a few days and here's Mitnick again. Why should this particular criminal get any play on slashdot? He wasn't even a particularly good hacker.
You're the editor with a taste for stories that most closely match my own. I've learned to avoid stuff from some of the other editors that just don't seem to "get it", but your posts were always interesting and in line with my interests, very much News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. I'm guessing that my interest in slashdot will wane without you at the helm, which is sad because I know from my comment history I've been coming here since at least 1999. slashdot has been my primary destination, the first site I open every morning, and the one I check most often during the day.
Best of luck in all your future endeavors!
Well, they may not want to remove it, but in my case they honored the EULA and got Steam to refund my money (for a differnt Ubi game). I'm just not going to install and use the Ubi launcher. I got enough of that kind of nonsense from GTA IV.
I just won't get it or play it. I recently got a refund on a Ubisoft game because of their "always on" DRM. I haven't bought StarCraft either, since I heard it has a similar requirement. I really don't care if Diablo III has a multiplayer component at all, since I'd never play it online in the first place. Developers are free to design their games as they wish, and consumers are free to vote with their wallets. I played all the previous Diablo games and expansion packs, and was really looking forward to Diablo III, but no game is so important that I'd put up with those restrictions. That's $120 that blizzard won't ever see from me.
I purchased the game via Steam. When I tried to run it, it popped up stuff about installing the Ubi launcher/client. The EULA clearly said I could get a refund if I didn't accept the terms of the agreement. I followed the instructions (requesting a refund via the Ubi support site.) They tried to send me to Steam for the refund, but I've dealt with their "customer service" enough to know that wouldn't work. So I pointed out the terms ofthe EULA, which specifically said it's Ubi's problem to handle refunds, and they contacted Steam to get the transaction reversed. I got notification from Steam today that the refund was issued, and the games are gone from my library.
I'm already getting a refund for an Ubi game that has that DRM (The Settlers 7). They tried to push me back to Steam for a refund, but I pointed them to their own EULA, where it says you can get a refund if you don't agree to the DRM and the retarded Ubi launcher, and they're handling it.
No game is so good, interesting, or important to my life that I'd be willing to submit to this always on DRM.
I dumped Facebook a few months back, because I got tired of having to constantly tweak the privacy settings, and I was drowning in Zynga spam from other users.
If you read the article, the claim is that the DMCA request was a mistake, not "fake". Big difference there!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5QqYVurImY